In my twenty-five years of reading appellate opinions I have never seen a superior court order an inferior court to depublish a published opinion. These opinions have already been published in actual books: the Southeastern Reporter and the South Carolina Reports. It’s not like the publishers or the owners of these books are going to rip out the offending pages. Instead we are supposed to engage in this intellectual exercise in which these published materials exist but we are to pretend as though they do not.

The South Carolina Supreme Court’s orders seem akin to the old USSR’s attempts to rewrite history to conform to the new orthodoxies. If the Supreme Court disagrees with the Court of Appeals’ reasoning, it should issue its own opinions rather than ordering the general public to treat the Court of Appeals’ opinions as though they never existed.